“MPAA/RIAA subvert democracy with super-broadcast-flag bid
The RIAA and MPAA have teamed up to demand that Congress get the FCC to create a super-duper broadcast flag for radio and TV. This means that they’ll get a veto over pretty much anything that can play video or music — from your iPod to your PC’s tuner card.

My cow-orker Danny O’Brien has written a brilliant, witty explanation of how the MPAA and RIAA are pulling this off in Congress, sneaking around behind closed doors to get this enacted without debate — and what you can do to stop the enterainment cartels to stop undermining American democracy “

It’s time to renew/reup my EFF donation/membership and suggest you consider it as well. (and not JUST for the BroadCast Flag stuff, they do a lot of defense of p2p and other digital fair use rights stuff that’s important, IMHO!)

Whoever at the end of October makes the “best” contribution as judged by me (again let me reiterate: it could be a collection of smaller contributions and refinements or one or two really awesome articles on DIY PVR / HTPC related subjects) will win their choice of a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 (retail), a Wired MediaMVP, or Fusion 5 Dvico lite HTDA/ATSC/QAM card!

The contest is open to folks in the USA, Canada, and the UK.

If you have questions about the wiki, contest, or having trouble editing, please post a reply/question to this forum thread.

There’s a sandbox area if you want to experiment without worry… and you don’t have to go crazy with wiki formattig… just type away and paste in links… the important part is the content/text (I can/others can pretty it up later 😉 ) To create a new page you can just add a word or phrase to the end of the URL (the part in italics/white below), and then start editting… like this…

They seem to be positioning the NVIDIA DualTV as a high(er) quality capture quality and some interesting bells and whistles. If the NVIDIA Pure Video DualTV encoding quality is half as good as the NVIDIA Pure Video Decoder is at mpeg2 decoding it should be a pretty awesome card! Of course the proof is in the pudding and the greatest hardware in the world is useless if the good 3rd party PVR applications don’t support it.

Matt at Innovation One has developed a USB IR transceiver that makes using multiple cable & sat boxes with MythTV much easier and more reliable (they are based in Canada, fwiw). They are seeking a few more Beta testers before they finalize the CommandIR – and were looking to see if any BYOPVR Canadian users was interested.

They do charge a nominal (below their cost) fee for the units, but if you’re interested in helping with the testing and have mulitple set top boxes to control and/or want a better way to consolidate your IR receiving/blasting this seems like a good product to check out!

VideoReDo MPEG editor has a new version out called VideoReDo Plus with a feature they call Ad Detective. The Ad Detective is an integrated commercial detection/marking/removal tool built into VideoReDo Plus.

What I like about VideoReDo is that it’s both really fast/easy to chop up MPEG2 files (there’s not transcoding or long load time and the interace is pretty straightforward), and it makes frame accurate mpeg2 cuts without screwing up the audio sync. This new commercial detection piece is just icing on the cake.

In any case it’s definitely worth the trial download to decide for yourself if it’s the right mpeg2 editing / commercial remvoing tool for you.

PVRblog notes that Jim Denney, TiVo’s Director of Product Marketing,
told TechBlog that these were probably just “false positives.”

“Denney said the copy protection is trigged by a flag in the video signal. The reports appearing on the Web appear to be cases where TiVo misinterprets noise in the signal as a copy protection flag, and imposes the restrictions.”

Dissapointed in the no QAM support! I didn’t think cablecard support/certification would be ready nearly in time, but thought QAM support coulda/shoulda/woulda been. Seems like a missed opportunity to me.